SmashPad Streamkend with Gran Turismo 6 – December 7 at 2 PM ET

The last major retail release for 2013 is the latest title in the Gran Turismo series, which brings a ton of cars and tracks to the table as the team at Polyphony Digital aimed to provide a much smoother experience than they offered in Gran Turismo 5 three years ago. Just from the little bit that I’ve played today, the game seems to do a much better job of introducing you to the game with a nice guided tutorial that gets you into a race right away before showing you the flow of progression through the campaign, which seems to have been made a little more obvious as you earn up to three stars per race based on the position you finish at that will unlock new cups and races over time. They’ve certainly spent more time making the menus more user-friendly so that you usually know where to go for what you want to do that leads us to a main menu where every option for every mode is pretty much available right there. The one negative that has certainly made its rounds on the internet news cycle is the fact that microtransactions are in GT6 with the option to purchase credits should you feel the need to get some extra spending money quickly, though I would have to mention that they’re sort of hidden away in this GT Store in a corner of the main menu with no menu prompts to buy credits should you attempt to purchase a car out of your price range. They seem to be handling that stuff in the best way possible short of not including that option in the first place, so take that for what you will.

With this being the last major retail release of the year, it’s safe to say that the upcoming schedule for SmashPad Streamkend is a bit empty right now. I think one of the big things I’ll do with upcoming shows is to take a look at either some of my favorite games of the year or maybe a game or two that I personally missed that I’d like to play before the end of the year.

To watch the stream, you can head right over to the SmashPad Live page to tune into the Twitch.tv stream directly from this site while still being able to chat without leaving our site. Of course, if you’d like to know when we start new live streams, you can subscribe to our Twitch.tv channel for the fastest notifications of when we’re live streaming something. If you miss the show, feel free to check out our Youtube channel and subscribe since we archive every SmashPad Streamkend there so you don’t miss out on the show. Our Twitter account is another great way to get quick notification of the newest content that goes up on SmashPad and our live streams.